


Love Is a Kind of Killing

by YouLookGoodInLeather



Category: A Court of Thorns and Roses Series - Sarah J. Maas
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Bloodplay, Cannibalism, Eating Disorders, Elain Shall Inherit The Earth, F/M, Monster Girls and Boys, hunger
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-05-27
Updated: 2017-06-03
Packaged: 2018-11-05 16:25:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11017125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YouLookGoodInLeather/pseuds/YouLookGoodInLeather
Summary: Elain is Nobility. She is a Noble Woman. She does not feelhunger, she does not feeldesire.Azriel is a victim. He is a survivor. He does not feelrage, he does not feelsorrow.And they will destroy themselves to keep it so, with all the world's shadows to help them.





	1. Not Like Other Girls

**Author's Note:**

> TW for Eating Disorders, Imagery of Blood and Body Horror. There will be increasingly graphic gore, body horror, gothic violence, and sexual content in future chapters. This is not meant to be pretty.

Elain has gone hungry many, many times before. But not like this. Never like this. 

Since poverty, she has known what it is to be dizzy from hunger, to be high on it, to float on clouds of waifish dissociation and laugh at the monstrous ache. She has known what it is to sit on soft pillows of snow and wince as the cushioned ground meets not flesh, but bone. She knows what it is to sit by fires, huddled in blankets, and never grow warm. What it is to watch her own hair fall out though she was only sixteen. What it is to look more petrifying than the monsters she so fears. 

Yet this is so much deeper. So much  _ more _ . How, she does not know.

She stuffs herself. Famished, she will sneak down to the kitchens at night and raid the pastries for the next day, eat loaf after loaf of bread with butter and rich cheeses and fruit and milk and cake and more bread until her body feels like it shall burst from how _full_ she is.   

And yet she hungers still. _It_ hungers still. For that force, that calling siren voice dwelling fierce within her stomach is nothing she has known before. Nothing she identifies with.  

It scares her. At first because she fears the food, fears just how much she, just one little girl, can consume and rip and swallow. Fears that her waif body will contort and parade to all who look upon her visible betrayals of her shame, at what she has done. For she has given into something all young noble girls are taught to ignore from the day they first taste sweetness. Unable to think of nothing else, she has fallen prey to hunger.  

And as she feared, as all the stories her mother told her warned, now that she plays victim, she cannot stop.  

It just gets worse. 

Soon the others start noticing, for it seems a small army breaks into their cellars and pantries every night to raid all manner of food. The only common factor seems to be their favouring of rich, salted meats.  

Elain never did much like meat. She despised the idea of eating the soft, furry animals she would sing to in the garden, the idea of killing another living creature. Before this, before becoming a fae and a seer and  _ a killer _ , the sight of meat alone turned her stomach. Now, she cannot get enough. 

No one ever catches her on her nightly visits. The shadows of the House of Wind seem to cling close to her as mocking, sneering witnesses, bearing judgement to her shame. They cloak her sweating, clammy skin every night and accompany her down to the kitchens and cellars, and relent only when she picks up that slice of buttered bread and drowns herself. 

But soon bread bores her. Ice cream and cakes and muffins feel sickly. All she wants is meat.  

At first she tries cooking it. But even the chicken takes hours and she worries the flames will wake others and draw attention. She knows her alternative if vile and foul and wretched. Yet there they hang, the smoked pork and cured beef and plucked chickens, locked with the ice. Locked behind a door that she has only to close her eyes and pull on, and she shall find it open.  

The hunger grows the longer she resists. It gnaws at her bones, ticks away in her stomach, and rots her brain until Feyre once again worries that the trauma of the Cauldron has ruined her once more. How will she ever tell Feyre that the visions did not bother her, but rather  _ this _ ? That she is so hungry she wants to devour the world.

The first time she gives in, there is a moment of relief. As she tears in with her teeth and sharp nails, shredding the chicken to pieces and swallowing the cold, slick raw meat in thick, glistening pieces, her stomach tightens in expectation. The slimy offering slides down her throat as easily as water and she gasps, her breath rising in a cloud of vapour in the freezing pantry. Her stomach settles, satisfied. 

Then the hunger returns tenfold, and she descends into oblivion. 

 

*

 

Everyone is concerned by how the entire house has been wiped clean of every single scrap of meat the next morning. Feyre and Rhys are speaking in hushed whispers, Mor and Cass patrol the perimeter, and Nesta and Amren leave to research in the Library.  

Elain sits alone in her room, perched on the edge of her bed, staring out of her window. Her hands, fingers thinner than ever, fiddle nervously with the skirts of her lap. Teeth grind together. She is still so, so hungry.  

It is impossible not to jump when out of a swirl of shadows, Azriel appears before the window, blocking out the rising sun. He is tall and broad and frightening, or should be, were all her emotions not tuned out by that numbing, endless hunger. She can smell something on him. The salt of sweat. Alcohol. The rust of dried blood. Her throat tightens, clenching. Her body screams from hunger.  

“I’m sorry I didn’t realise earlier,” he says quietly, and she wonders if she would understand him if she were not so distant from reality. “I just never thought- That it could happen to _you_.” Should she be insulted? She does not care. Her senses have distorted so entirely that she barely hears him. Instead, her detection of scent has heightened so that she thinks she can catch whiffs of cooked meat and fresh kills and living stock roaming about down in Velaris below them. How fast she could she reach and sink her teeth into them if she started running now?   

For a second, she is startled back to reality by the realisation that Azriel has a knife in his hands. A flash of silver, a slash of red, and she realises he has cut himself from wrist to elbow on his right arm, sleeves pushed up to his shoulders. Without warning, he sheathes the knife and straddles her lap upon the bed. Presses his fresh wound to her trembling lips. Is blood the cure? Will blood end this, as Feyre’s did for Rhysand?  

“Go on,” he says quietly, and she waits for the instruction to  _ drink _ , to take into herself the end to this nightmare. He watches her, with eyes of shadow and such dark, pitiful understanding. She realises too late that he is no fallen angel. 

“ _ Eat. _ ”

 

*

 

There are no words. The act is complete. Azriel sits upon the windowsill, nursing his arm. It is nothing more than a stump, right up to his shoulder. There was screaming, screaming he kept concealed with his own magic. Thrashing. He’d tried to shove her off.  

She recalls, with faint bemusement, that she’d choked him unconscious in response. That she’d found her body surging with furious strength whenever it met resistance. That her jaw, teeth, lips, so used to daintily nibbling at salads, had crushed and torn and guzzled down the flesh of his arm as if it were her only pastime.  

She doesn’t even care, collapsed back upon the blood and gore stained bed. Her stomach sings with contented fullness. She thinks of nothing, not hunger, not guilt, not shame. She merely stares at the ceiling and drifts through blissful nothingness. 

He sits slowly, painstakingly healing and regrowing his stump arm. She’d never known he could heal. Yet here he seems well practiced. He does not look at her, only at his reforming limb. 

“What am I?” She does not look at him, either. If anything, she addresses the ceiling. It seems as likely to give her answers. He winces as a bone cracks back into place.

“Like me.” His arm slowly materialises itself a new elbow, stretching and knitting itself to begin on the forearm. “A monster.” 

Finally, she glances over at him. Observes the hunched tension of his shoulders, the pallor of his face. What she notices most clearly though is that smell, of flesh and blood and something so seductive. Something sexual. Something  _ sexy _ . 

She has never given into that kind of desire before. Ignored hunger. Suppressed infatuation. Silenced the heated throb of her cunt at the sights of pretty boys and girls. 

Girls like her don’t feel such things. Girls like her don’t eat people. Girls like her don’t lie on blood-stained beds and feel for one strange moment like they could own the world with a bat of an eyelash. The flash of a sharp tooth.  

“No,” she says, looking back up at the ceiling. “I’m not.”  She is not this  _ thing _ in her stomach. But for that strange moment, she wants to be. 


	2. Acquired Taste

Azriel explains all this to her in the same voice, a quiet, flat monotone. He does not pause for her to ask questions, nor hesitate over scary words. He speaks of things like “cannibalised magic” and “internalised curses” and “unconscious self-loathing”. Elain does not relate. She is a beautiful girl with beautiful dresses who nurtures beautiful gardens. She does not have room in her life for such problems. She is the one who loves all others, who _cares_. She does not get to show weakness, for she knows they will think her selfish. She has to keep smiling.   

Nothing he says makes her smile, though she finds her lips curving up into a ghost of one. There was something so… intimate about feeding from him. She’s seen him in a way she imagines know one else has, and it all feels so perverse, so private. Her younger human self would blush and feel such shame, yet she smirks now. Smirks at what she’s stolen. 

“The others… don’t know. About this.” Azriel is fully-healed and fully-dressed once again, pacing the length of his room in the house. “I’ve learned how to hide it, so I can show you. There are people who… fae who heal rapidly enough to accommodate for our _needs_.” Her stomach purrs greedily at the fantasy of a realm of fae all waiting for her to feast upon them. “If the others knew. If _Mor_ ever found out…”  

“I found out,” Elain points out, blinking up at him. He stares back. “You never had to tell me you have it too.” 

He’s in no hurry to agree with her, but after a strained pause, he nods. “I suppose. I guess I needed _someone_ to know. And you… seem trustworthy.” Elain smiles at that, at this piece of evidence that the image she presents is still holding true. Does he think of her as a monster now? Surely he must. And that terrifies her, really it does, yet the terror doesn’t resonate within her chest. Instead she feels almost happy, having someone know that maybe her smiles aren’t always grown from flower gardens.   

“People tend to trust weak little girls,” She mumbles to herself. Stretching an arm out of the open window, she twists her pale fingers in and out of the fragmented sunlight, refracted through the white star blossoms that have begun to fall, catching the wind and filling the sky so it looks almost as if it is snowing, even if it is near summer.  Her hands are as delicate and shapely as ever, bearing no talons like her sister, nor callouses like Azriel. Thank god, she thinks, I do not have a monster’s skin. 

“Why do you say that?” Azriel has stopped his pacing. He is looking at her in confusion and the frown upon his face is so genuine she can’t help but giggle. He is charming, in a way no human man ever was. It is so effortless, she almost lets herself relax. But she wouldn’t seem so happy, so beautiful, if she relaxed at the slightest show of affection. Like her sister, her mask took effort to hold in place. 

Though, unlike her sister, she often let herself believe her own mask. She convinced herself over and over, late into the night, that the world deserved kind and caring and flowers, and that her role in life was to provide just that. Even if sometimes all she wanted to do was scream and lash out at all those who had wronged her and her kind. Killing Hybern… nothing had ever felt so good. Nothing had ever felt so _right_. Yet Noble Women like her do not kill people. They do not think about it at all.   

“There’s no need to flatter me,” she says quietly. “You’ve already seen me…” 

“It’s not flattery.” He appears out of shadows once more - it should be startling, were she not somehow able to feel it coming, the shadows warning her with a silent whisper. He takes her wrist, cups her hand in his, staring down at her. “You are a Seer. A Shadowhunter. And now also…”

“A demon? Cursed? What? What  _ is _ this?”

“I don’t know. I’ve looked, in the library.  There are few tales of High Fae feeding on their own kind. Some vampire half-breeds. Pophaiga. People like us… they don’t believe we are High Fae anymore. Stories call us Wendigos. But we’re considered no more than myth and fiction.”

“So I really am the story parents tell their children at night to scare them asleep.”

“You don’t have to be.”

She doesn’t have to ask; She just looks at him, and he brandishes his own wrist, still pink and lined with white scratches from where he is still healing up the last of her feast. “You don’t have to kill people. You don’t have to hurt those who aren’t willing.”

“You’re willing?”

“I am.” His eyes are dark and were she not so convinced she is dreaming, the darkness shrouding him would scare her. “I won’t let you go through what I did when it first- I didn’t know what was happening. I thought it was something I chose.” 

 Elain thinks of just how good it felt to drive that knife through the tyrant’s throat. Of how often her fingers have itched through the years to avenge her family against the world that abandoned them. She looks up at him and smiles softly. “Maybe we did.”

 

* 

 

The next time,she comes to him.  

She has never been so bold before in her life. Always, she was taught always, the woman must await the man. Make herself pretty so that he chooses her, tame herself to be agreeable prey to the best hunters. 

But she is hungry. And though thousands of miles away, she feels the heat and tug of Lucien, tied to her at the rib, Azriel is closer, _there_ , licked at by shadows that call her closer, remind her constantly that he is ready. As long as he has flesh, he is ready. 

She calls shadows to envolpe her with ease now, so that she drifts past her two arguing sisters unseen and unheard. Her footsteps are silent for she does not touch the floor - instead her body flickers and melts into shadow, floating across in double speed to where he is sat writing. Glancing over his shoulder, she sees scattered notes and opened textbooks, but cares little as her stomach growls in aggravation. She never cared for the vapid etiquette and manners guides she swallowed by the dozen. Her throat is coarse and dry from them.

She wants something wet.  

Without awaiting permission she slides onto his lap, purring like a housecat at the scent of his skin, salty and almost mist-tinted, cold and appealing. Testing the waters, she licks up across his neck and yes, yes it is still there, that insatiable urge to bite down and devour. He is stiff and uncertain but unresisting beneath her, malleable to her touch and push. Her body, which has always felt vulnerable and petite and wretched, now sings with power, surging with purpose as she forces him back into the chair and grinds her crotch against his abdomen, hard and thick with muscles. 

A second itch arises, a hot, ticking itch burying deep beneath her skin in the pit of her stomach, up her clit, between her thicks, a muscular vibration of arousal and want and _power_. She wants to fuck something, someone, him. To pin him down and claim him, for she has never been free to demand submission before. Always submitting. Always shutting down hunger.   

She is ravenous, and he is waiting.  

Her teeth, sharp and skillful, grate down his neck, drawing blood that drips down beneath his shirt collar. She laps it up in an attempt to savour the hot-want sensation, head spinning, muscles thrumming as drunken heat washes through her body, pounding in her throat and groin. She drinks, and he whimpers, trembling beneath her like a delicate flower, trapped betwixt her powerful thighs. He smells like sweat and fear and uncertain arousal and she would drown in it forever if she could.  

It is not enough all too quickly, and soon she sinks into peeling off flesh and sucking at muscle fibres, the fat soft and sickly whilst the muscle if hard and tough and sits heavy and full in her stomach. Her face is smeared with sticky blood and it slicks across her eyelashes, her hair - there is so much it stinks, overwhelming her nostrils and soaking her neck, and clothes, her skirts.  

With animal ferocity she slams the chair back so he tips to the floor, back pressed against the ground and the chair. His eyes are distant and blurred from pain and something far more insidious, yet he grunts and looks up at her, lips parting, mouthing her name as he groans. His good hand catches her skirts, pulls her closer. She does not need telling twice. 

Dripping and heavy, she presses her cunt to his face and rubs the slick of blood covering her thighs and pussy across his searching mouth, painting his lips with both their wetness. However lost in intoxicating pain he is, he responds to perfection, nuzzles and nosing closer before licking across and taking his tongue to her clit, matching that pulsing sensation within her. As he eats her out, his nose rubs her clit, undisturbed by the scent of blood and cum, or how half of his arm and torso are missing. Almost as if he has done this before.  

She comes inelegantly, blood and saliva dripping from her aching mouth as she doubles over and gasps, stunned and elated. Her whole body is shaking, her soul electrified, and it is all she can do to sit on his chest rather than suffocate his face, arching back to heave in air. 

Only Hybern felt better than this. 

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr @squaddreamcourt
> 
> Title from 'Dare Me' by Megan Abbott


End file.
